To prosper in the digital age, companies must undergo two types of digital transformation. Firstly, they need to become digitized. Secondly, they have to become digital.
Indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, have been working to restore the soil and forests, with remarkable success. Twenty-five communities have restored 49,000 acres (20,000 hectares) over the past 20 years. Restoration efforts are driven by the communities themselves, who together make up the Chocho-Mixtecas Community Alliance.
Worldwide, democracy and global freedom have been declining since 2006. The COVID-19 pandemic made things worse, with many leaders choosing to use authoritarian measures to contain the virus. It was difficult for the opposition to protest the measures because they weren't allowed to gather in groups.
After the box office success of Dune last year, director Denis Villeneuve confirms a second chapter of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic is in the making.
“Right now,” he announced, “I’m in what you call ‘soft prep’… It’s that beautiful part where it’s just dreaming, looking at the ceiling and thinking about the movie storyboards… It’s the moment where everything is possible, before we have the shock of reality that will come.”
In 1991, researchers at Berkeley Lab invented a triple-glazed window they hoped would revolutionise the building industry. Though windows with three panes had existed for years, what distinguished Berkley’s design from precursors was the presence of a centralised, thin layer of glass. This made the window lighter, as less material could be used to make the external panes. It also made the window more energy efficient, as compartments either side of the central layer could be filled with insulating gas.
On December 23, 1924, a group of international businessmen gathered in Geneva for a meeting that would change the world for decades. Delegates from all major lightbulb manufacturers were present, including the Netherlands’ Philips and the United States’ General Electric. While revellers celebrated Christmas elsewhere in the city, the group founded the Phoebus cartel, a supervisory body that would carve up the global incandescent lightbulb market.
According to NPR, around the year 70,000 B.C., a volcano called Toba on Sumatra Island in Indonesia, erupted, blowing about a thousand kilometres of vaporized rock into the air. It is by far the largest volcanic eruption we know of.
According to Vox Media, the idea of a basic income was, for decades, something of a policy fantasy. However, the last few years have seen it become less fringe and more mainstream. In fact, we now have many limited basic income programs running around the world.
The general idea—that the government should give every citizen a regular infusion of money with no strings attached—has been around since the 16th century. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has given the idea fresh momentum, with the crisis generating significant financial loss and uncertainty.
According to PhysOrg, a scientific publication, scientific knowledge used in international studies is predominantly sourced from English-language documents, as it is assumed that all scientific knowledge is available in English. However, according to research scrutinizing over 400,000 peer-reviewed papers in 326 journals, published in 16 languages, scientific papers written in languages other than English may hold untapped information crucial to the conservation of global biodiversity.
According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), many people with high-pressure jobs find themselves unhappy with their careers, despite working hard their whole lives to get to their current position. What happens if you identify so closely with your work that hating your job means hating yourself?
Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. Enmeshment prevents the development of a stable, independent sense of self. You can become enmeshed with your career, too.
Toyota was the leader in eco-friendly hybrid vehicles for many years, according to ArsTechnica. The automotive company had a fuel-efficiency edge over its competition. However, it has recently struggled to compete with companies that sell electric vehicles such as Tesla, Nissan and Volkswagen.
Toyota has made two critical choices. First, it tethered itself to hybrids. Second, it bet its future on hydrogen. But now governments around the world are moving to ban fossil-fuel vehicles of any kind.
According to the National Geographic Society, Earth now has a new ocean: the Southern Ocean.
Geographers have debated whether the waters around Antarctica had enough unique characteristics to deserve their own name, or whether they were simply cold, southern extensions of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.
In 2017, Shanna Swan and Hagai Levine, along with six other researchers, estimated the average sperm count for 43,000 men in 55 countries across the world. The data, from 185 previously published studies, suggest that sperm counts fell by about 25% between 1973 and 2011. They found that sperm counts had in fact fallen by about 50% in Western countries over the period. Although the data were less plentiful, similar trends were observed in developing countries, too.
Please have a look at the chart below and discuss what you see with your teacher.
National Public Radio (NPR), a publicly-funded American news organization, held an interview with the famous Japanese author Haruki Murakami about his new collection of stories, First Person Singular. In this collection, Murakami writes in the first-person singular “I” perspective.
According to The Economist, in April 2021, Apple, which supplies one-fifth of the world’s smartphones and around half of the United States', introduced a software update that will end targeted advertisement by companies. Its latest mobile operating system forces apps to ask users if they want to be tracked. Many are expected to decline. It is the latest privacy move forcing marketers to rethink how they target online ads.
According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), people often think they are better listeners than in actuality. They believe good listening means just a few things: not talking when others are speaking, letting others know you are listening through facial expressions and verbal sounds (e.g., Mm-hmm), and being able to repeat what others have said.
According to Shape of Life, an online resource on everything related to animals, the Anomalocaris (ah-NOM-ah-LAH-kariss), from the Greek meaning “unusual shrimp”, was a major predator of the ancient seas during the Cambrian Explosion 530 million years ago.
According to the Harvard Business Review, the higher leaders rise in the ranks, the more they are at risk of getting an inflated ego. The bigger their ego grows, the more they are at risk of ending up in an insulated bubble, losing touch with their colleagues, the culture and ultimately their clients.
According to The Economist, languages face a trade-off between complexity and speed. Those packed with information are spoken more slowly, while simpler ones are spoken faster. As a result, most languages are equally efficient at conveying information.
For instance, a Japanese translation of this text would be longer and a Thai one would be shorter, but readers would finish reading it at about the same time.
Have a look at the graph below and discuss what you see with your teacher.
Albert Einstein spent nearly a decade developing his theory of general relativity, which he published in 1916. The theory asserts that gravity is matter warping space-time and so gravitational bends in space can alter the passage of time. While an appealing theory, it is yet unproven.
According to CNN, the first image of a black hole, captured in 2019, has revealed more support for Einstein's theory. The new finding has suggested his theory is now 500 times harder to disprove.
